Planting needed to mask office building

Facades of the new office building on Bath’s South Quays impact very abruptly on heritage assets to the east and north, our World Heritage Site being one of the fundamental reasons why visitors and residents come to Bath and the success of its retail centre.

B&NES is centrally involved in the development of this area and must insist on visual amelioration by planting on a massive scale in the re-entrant courtyard to the east of the building, and a sensitive scheme for re-planting the riverside bank in order to mask the massive retaining wall to the river. Steve Osgood

Bath

Readers who are Bath residents and have experience of living near student HMOS will have felt sympathy and perhaps outrage on reading the article (12 August) about the destruction of the community in Oldfield Park.

Those who don’t share that experience may have been shocked that such a thing can have happened.

They may be under the impression that this has been the result of some kind of accidental or natural process. It isn’t.

Universities plan their expansions and promote themselves to prospective students accordingly.

If they don’t provide the necessary accommodation for the resulting increases in numbers across three years of attendance, the impact on local housing is obvious and predictable.

Through its process of granting multiple HMO licences to student landlords our council ensures that family housing is made available to groups of students, thus overseeing and facilitating the very destruction of the community that the article describes.

When families feel they have to sell up and leave their homes because they “can’t stand it any more” it won’t simply be due to some problems with parking, but more likely a range of anti-social behaviours associated with student HMOS, in particular late night noise which disturbs both adults and children.

The disturbance can be so great that it affects not just adjacent neighbours but groups of nearby houses.

When students rent their houses they have to sign a document agreeing not to behave in ways which will cause nuisance to their neighbours or face possible eviction; likewise, landlords are supposed to take responsibility for the behaviour of their tenants, but many do not and simply get away with negligent management of their properties because the council’s HMO licensing department takes no action against them in order to protect Bath residents.

If help is requested from the Student Community Partnership it can take months for change to be effected by a procedure of contacts if students are not initially responsive, and residents may then be required to provide ‘objective’ evidence.

A friend who lives next door to a HMO recently had the experience of phoning environmental services about this very problem and was told that she should expect extra noise if she lived next to a HMO!

Faced with such a lack of support and protection from our council, it is no wonder that families leave their homes and, in some cases, leave Bath, creating more opportunity for profiteering landlords.

We are justified in questioning just what values this council espouses when it fails in its duties to protect residents from excessive noise and to ensure our right to

family life. Finally, we should remind ourselves that every time a house becomes a student HMO the council loses the council tax for that property because neither students nor landlords pay for council services; the consequent shortfall is likely to be made up by increases in council tax for residents.

We pay the price for council policy in every conceivable way.

Bear Flat resident